Staff Software Engineer, Search

The posting, as Babylist wrote it

What the Role Is

We’re hiring a Staff Software Engineer who’ll be the technical lead for a new Search team at Babylist. This new team will be focused on moving Babylist’s search capability in-house, making our search results more relevant and personalized, and partnering with other teams to transform search in the product from functional to delightful.

Registry building is the heart of the Babylist product. Every parent builds a list of dozens of products, from swaddle to stroller, with real stakes (a friend or family member is going to buy these things, and a baby is going to use them). As a universal registry, this registry also typically spans many retailers. This makes registry building on Babylist one of the most interesting search and personalization problems in consumer e-commerce.

This is zero-to-one work, with big ambitions. You’d build a search capability from the ground up, with a clear mandate from leadership to do it. In your first year, we expect to have rebuilt search to be highly relevant and personalized, and delivered big bets like universal search: one experience across items we sell and items from other retailers, and across products, guides and registries. We also want to work with Addie, our AI registry assistant, to have LLMs play a role in the search experience.

If you want to tune an established search system, this isn’t the right role. If you’ve worked inside a strong search team and want to build a new system from scratch at a company earlier in that journey, read on.

What You'll Own

A Staff Engineer at Babylist sets direction. You’ll be the technical lead for search: you decide where it goes over the next year or two, sequence the bets that get there, and make the technical and product calls along the way. You’re still in the code and will drive initiatives forward across multiple teams. You’ll have software engineering and machine learning engineering support on the team.

A few examples of initiatives you’d drive on the Search team:

• Build search in-house. Choose the architecture for indexing, retrieval and serving, and plan a seamless migration. The system you design replaces what we use today and is the foundation for everything below.
• Define what a good result is. Decide how we measure result quality, then improve it through query understanding, ranking and the behavioral signals we collect.
• Unify search across everything we show. One experience across items we sell and items from other retailers, and across products, guides and registries, including how to rank items we don’t sell next to ones we do.
• Decide how search and recommendations fit together. Bring what we know about a user and their registry into results, and decide how much retrieval and ranking search shares with our recommendation models.
• Make search conversational. Work with the Addie team, our AI registry assistant, on queries like “best stroller for urban family,” where the shopper describes a need instead of naming a prod

[…]
ays wide.

How We Work

Remote-first across the US and Canada, and we have been for years. That's not changing. We trust you to own your time and your outcomes, and we get everyone in a room together twice a year. Teams are small, pods of three to five engineers, so nothing you ship disappears into a committee. You'll work shoulder to shoulder with product, design and data, and with the partners across the business who rely on what you ship. You'll also stay close to customers yourself: sitting in on user interviews, watching session recordings, riding along with support. Here that's part of the engineering job, on a regular basis.

How We Hire

Three rounds, usually two to three weeks start to finish.

• Recruiter conversation (30 minutes). Trade context: what you want next, what we're building and straight answers on comp, team and remote.
• Technical screen (1 hour). One round, no AI, language-agnostic. Reach for Google when you normally would. We just want to see how you reason from first principles.
• Final round (4 hours). Four one-hour interviews: system design, AI-assisted coding with the tools you'd actually use here, product sense and culture and values. You'll hear back either way within 24 to 48 hours.

Benefits

• Company-paid medical and fully covered dental and vision
• A 401(k) match
• Generous paid parental leave for birthing and non-birthing parents, plus a gradual return-to-work program
• Winter Wonder Week, a paid company-wide week off at the end of the year
• A remote-work stipend
• Mental-health and wellness support

A Few Things to Know

• We record and transcribe interviews to evaluate candidates, in line with applicable privacy laws.
• We expect you to use AI in your work and we welcome it in the process, but what you submit and say should reflect your own thinking.
• If you have a family member or close relationship with a Babylist employee, let your recruiter know.
• Official outreach only ever comes from an @babylist.com address